Love in Seasons

In their first, the timing was all wrong in the dilapidated stairway of a narrow frat house. She was pledged to another yet that did not stop him from confessing his love to her tears. How could there be tears missing what never happened? The second time the timing was right but the people had changed. His heart was hardened and he wore a smile for accessory. In the dance floor crowded with people seeking and calling out, their eyes found one another amongst the many shots fired and missed.

“You looked so sad.” His simple, whispered words are ones she would remember until the day everything turned to stardust and even beyond that.

The third time was the final and also the story for a story is both a beginning and the end. The third time, she trekked to him, moth to the flame, giving up more than she knew before she even knocked on that door.

Boy looked like a man but was really a boy. Lonely, proud, beautifully aloof but really all that was a cover for a boy who felt lost in his surroundings, out of touch with all the classmates and their groups and alliances unfathomable. He was part of the military nomads, the oldest brother of three, and took more pleasure in working for others than in the joys of life. But underneath, his most deeply buried fantasies could make a romantic weep. Girl knew that, the first moment they lay together after the third. She listened to the words he did not know he had always been waiting to say. One night became two became three. They slept, chest to chest pressed so tight there were bruises for where hearts jumped out to reach one another. There were eyes reaching out for the year they had missed, meeting in the spot where all souls, memories, cosmos intersected.

And the sleeping Boy would not know how she caressed the precipice of cheekbone to thick eyebrows down to the slope of the nose. And Girl would never fully understand the “I love you” carried away by the wind as all things leave.

Girl was a flitting butterfly in disguise, softly weaving beneath the many petals of people and their colorful lies. She tried to to love, to know without disdain but she was still alone amongst the shallow, changing flowers of the world. She was the only child of two people who loved with fault and their entire being. Since the age of six, she lived dreaming of ashes, knowing one day, some day she will truly be alone in the world, without another to answer to, and then she will really fly away like the butterflies she dreamed of. Boy was the rock she searched the entire earth for with the fitting broad shouldered embrace to peel away those wings.

Girl fell so quickly and suddenly, surprising even herself like the feathery ice flakes that came down South Street that day. His eyes, crinkled into lines of two parallel half-moons, breaking across her midnight sky. One picture he overlooked but she would adore forever like all the other objects of beauty they saw that day.

Love happens in the season of snow. A winter fight in the Hamco Courtyard will leave a nonpermanent scar on his face full of many others. It snows again on their way back from a basketball game of lucky backward shots. She loses herself in Boy’s arms, which lift her up, twirling her around like a Russian winter marionette.

Then, there was the lost video, a drunken game of forgotten beer pong at a friend’s party. They were two children lit so completely in pure white happiness as he played ping pong balls off the wall into the cup, to see her smile and laugh again and again until she collapsed like Daisy in Gatsby’s pile of silk shirts.

Boy took Girl to the city by the sea, the rocky shores of Annabelle Lee. He sees the world through the calculated precision of the camera lens as she ran wild with the seagulls, wondering if she could drift away in to the cosmic clouds with them. Instead, she chooses to drop into the silent Boy’s arms. This feels more like Home than a house, Girl thinks.

Spring was the season of tender growth. Boy meets Girl in the city and they pass a lone flutist with silvery song. They tease and challenge each other with rounds of pool, Pokemon, and karaoke. He wins the bet, daring her to stay but runs her to the train, and running even after she leaves. Girl watches the crescent moon following her the entire journey back, raindrops running down her face.

“Don’t make me sad…don’t make me cry”, she played Boy’s song to herself in the empty after hour compartments of trains moving everywhere and nowhere.

On the darkest night before downpour, Girl steps into the the insect orchestra of the Biopond, searching for the one moon flower to make her dream come true. Let him love me, she entrusted onto the flower like the wish lanterns in her visions. Girl’s wish came true. It was the only one that would.

March 31st, 2012. He whispered “I love you” through wet lashes and dilated pupils open once again with hope.

A flower bloomed then in the Pass of Love.
This moment.
Through worlds,
worlds.

They were young sparrows following each other in circles and filling the inebriated Fling night with wild love song. Dancing, crying, fighting, embracing with more alcohol and less reservation, they slept holding each other again and again.

But school ends all too early in the heat of summer flame. Long after the withered flowers had faded, Girl follows Boy to Maryland to meet his family. They spend the days eating sweet raspberry ice cream, climbing trees and giant canoes, sharing hidden kisses by the dock in the city where his parents’ love had once begun. Blue crabs in old bay. A water fight. Kaleidoscopic bubbles. They are the family’s two puppies, nipping after each other’s paws in the early summer heat.

Boy follows Girl to her modest home for three, where she spent half a decade hiding and exploring the recesses of her mind, whispering to trees more words than to the few friends she had not. Twelve four leaf clovers and one pressed beside gypsy black eyes. All the luck in the world could not grant their one wish.

The candle wick grows shorter to their separation. In a fateful visit, a pseudo family of four (Boy, Girl, Friend, Roommate) spend an illusory night rendered by intoxication. They cry out into a dark room, sealing away the smell of rice wine and flashing rainbow lights. Half-children again or people who are too old have come too far, lived too long to return to days when we can feel without binding attachment. There in the computer screen was Adored, hiding her tears with one hand. Beside was Friend, his bowed head trembling with useless, dry sobs. Like a summer twilight’s dream a year ago. There they were lying in the grass watching clouds roll by yet time moves too fast and passes them by without a single glimpse back. Friend and Adored’s feet lead them to the finish line into the wind executioner which does not still.

Roommate was the executioner, who comes between Boy and Girl without a single touch. The first shadow grows in Girl’s heart.

Girl follows Boy half way across the country in the road trip of a lifetime. They survive a rear end collision and driving ticket. They witness blue ridge mountain ranges, windmills windmills turning round, and bright Oklahoma sunset before they touch down in Albuquerque. Boy brings Girl around His city of Sandia Peaks. He picks her a cactus thorn and takes her to meet his most loyal. After, they ride the shaking tramway up 2.7 miles past deep canyons and impaling rock masses. They miss the sunset but catch the moon glowing above brighter city stars twinkling below.

“Do you like this?”
“I love this”

They Pygmalion breathed life in one another Galatea with whispered I love you’s. Life was there in the hands held together during driving and in the stereo lyrics, “Your skin and bones turn into something beautiful. And you know, for you, I’d bleed myself dry,” of Coldplay’s Yellow.

Girl knew at last this was where Boy would belong forever. In the dry heated air of chapped lips and beating sun drums, he saw Girl dancing beneath giant air balloons. In the cornwall rows of identical ranch homes, Boy saw Girl growing big with new life, two sons just as pure and great as their father was. In the historical legacy of a national atomic tragedy, Boy would be the town hero, a rose who could never stray too far from the desert.

The summer was a long agonizing nightmare for Girl. Days became calendar markers for the next awaited reunion. There boy was in the hours before sleep, in the waking time of day and work, it was him, always him. Only in dreams could she achieve the same feeling of completion, which had sprouted and been ripped from her so suddenly. Each and every one of the overflowing essence of love was folded up into tiny red celestial tokens for Boy’s happiness.

Boats and Birds. A sky to turn jet black for a star to show off its light. Just leave her the star dust to remember him by. An ocean ebbing and flowing for the boat to probe curiosity. Just leave her the wake to remember him by.

A letter meant to last forever could not survive two years. In five years, fifty years…no one will remember.

Circle infinity written out in sparklers, true shooting stars which last as long as they will. Girl still longs for the bottle to capture the real tears Boy shed for her. Roller coaster tracks were paved to the sky; they were shot to the moon and stars, chiseled into constellation memorials. And Boy took Girl to the land of ice and sand. Sand angels and cold burials, they touched skin to skin with only sand between, the changing shades of periwinkle and lavender beaming down upon them.

Hot, scorching, they tangoed too close to the flame. All the chances they took. Were so close. To something better left unknown.

Girl cannot forget her summer nightmare. They lie together with boy sleeping alone in a one person bed. Another shadow grows.

Boy and Girl reunite in the season trees die. Everything and nothing has changed. Boy is still Boy but Girl no longer sees him. His anima has been touched by a dream greater than what she could be, what they could be. It shines greater than the entire university yet still is not great enough to encompass her.

They play at a family. Girl makes brown sugar ginger tonic for Boy’s sick throat. Home broiled BBQ Cha Shao, pistachio encrusted chicken, concocting alchemy in place of gourmet recipes. Church on Sundays. Boy’s little happinesses.

One night, Girl puts on Njosnavelin and monotonous soul language brings them to another time.

“What do you picture?”

Boy pulls Girl close to his chest, the spot long familiar and reserved for her.

“I see us, old, after a lifetime together. I’ll hold you just like I do now and you won’t be scared to die because we’ll do it together.”

Boy and Girl drawing in their very last breaths and the conjured dance of a high school prom dream. They were the college lovers trying to occupy past childhood voids and the missing dream of the future lovers.

The shadows suppressed too long hits with all the fury of an unleashed Hurricane. Inside four strong walls, they were kept dry and safe in only physical sense. For all her nights staring at ceiling tiles, the hurricane might as well be within.

Snowboarding down Blue Mountain, Boy loses her in more than one way. Girl meets him but his sadness is real and flesh, more than the game at play.

For their full year come circle, funeral sky lanterns break open the ocean above the Susquehanna. A Ranstead room affair.

Boy was the only red rose for Girl. How he stepped out into the sun, blooming truly, fearlessly.

Spring was bleeding just like the wine, which ran red for their still beating hearts.

Graduation knocks them off their feet, which were too delicate for the descent. Kabobeesh, Italian market, Parisian street in Philadelphia. But summer could not save them.

Another road trip, but more tears than the last. Santa Fe, Antelope Canyon, Monument Valley.
In time, Girl became another pair of high heels dashing in and out New York sky scrappers. The bigger the city, the more spaces there are, between people and within people. At night, she steps out onto her balcony to gaze at the too-bright skyline and dreams of Sandia.

This year’s summer smog was unbearably oppressive. The overflowing pool were their email correspondences and secret inside jokes pressed by Girl into dry, untouched lilies. Boy does not know she walked thirty blocks extra each day in knife point heels and boiling city steam just to hear his voice a little longer.

Seasons come and seasons go. The moon never ceases to wax and wane.

Before long, their time together had frozen, struggling to catch up to everything else that is barreling into the future at the speed of sound. Work, enterprise, school, exams, graduation.

Boy grew to hate Girl’s Wall Street wolf pack and Girl began fearing Boy’s ties to domesticity. Really they hated themselves and each other for being made to feel inadequate. They were trying hard to hide from their greatest sorrow: the truth that they were not what would make each other happy. Resentment was the cover for insecurity. Boy resented Girl for not seeing his sacrifice and Girl resented Boy for not seeing hers. And they no longer wanted to give up more, though the little they had given was not worth the caustic words.

“I could never do it without you. In my dreams, you are always there, my partner beside me.”
“I’m your good luck charm! Don’t for get that.”

And since when had their red thread of fate torn past breaking point. It was not the computer screens which separated them but they themselves. Girl could never cope with the feeling of incompletion. Instead, she removed the ability to feel entirely.

And Boy hardened himself further, becoming crueler. Their break up threats and furious hang ups were 10% anger and 90% mind games. Breaks increased a day at a time each time they were used. The irony lay in how much more distance the two needed now that they were a thousand miles apart.

In beginning they missed more than what transpired. In finality they forgot more than what they should have missed.

Final separation contained only fury, not sadness.

The twin trees had long died and Boy and Girl had become ordinary.

They will beat on separately against the waves of life, which will carry them further and further from the fork of a path they had once shared together.

Are you real, real, real?
Do you feel feel butterfly?

Only the children who inherit the greatest sadness can recall the history of when Boy was the Sun and Girl was the Moon. Sun would die every day for the Moon to rise in the night.

In Sun, Moon had found a love that was true and real. And in that moment of beautiful passion, she would lose her fear of death. Though the thought returns as it always does, she will just love again with enough passion to push death out of their minds until they make love again.

A thousand sorry’s, but, most of all,
Thank You. Goodbye my first love.